1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the fields of electrically active hydrocarbon polymers.
The electropolymerization of aromatic compounds is a proven and convenient route to a number of electroactive polymers such as polythiophene, polypyrrole, and polyaniline (Handbook of Conducting Polymers, 1986). Many applications have been envisioned for electroactive polymers including their use as electrodes in batteries (Novak, 1997), as conductive materials (Pethrick, 1997), as electroluminescent materials (Gustafsson et al., 1992; Yamamoto, et al., 1992), and for use in electrochromic devices (Monk et al., 1995). Electropolymerization is an important synthetic technique in these fields where many materials are not processable because polymer films of varying thickness can be easily produced using this method.
Fully conjugated ladder polymers have been chemically synthesized using Diels-Alder reactions (Schluter et al., 1997). These polymers may promise to exhibit many interesting and useful properties, and much work has been dedicated to producing pure polymers with long, uninterrupted ladder structures. Polymers of this type are highly insoluble, given their inflexible nature, and efforts to produce soluble precursors that can be chemically or thermally treated to form the ladder polymer have received much attention. The electropolymerization method described here presents an alternative route to such polymers and also a facile route to conveniently produce films of the polymer that are easily studied.